It is now down to two drives at The Tech Report, only the Samsung 840 Pro and a HyperX 3K which was brought in to replace an model with no stamina have reached the 2 petabyte mark and are still going. The 840 Pro has now used 61% of its used block reserve due to flash failures and while the Sandforce compression has allowed the HyperX to hit this mark with only 1.4 petabytes actually written it has still had 31 sectors reallocated and 2 uncorrectible errors. That puts the HyperX in a difficult spot in that while it is still writing data it is not truly trustworthy anymore. The drive speeds have remained remarkably consistent though the 840 is slowing down somewhat over time, check out the actual benchmark results in the latest update to The Tech Report's torture test.

"Our SSD Endurance Experiment has reached an astounding two petabytes of writes. Only two drives remain, and they're coping very differently. We've checked in on their health and performance to see how each one is holding up."

Many drives have died over the last year and a bit. The Tech Report has been torturing SSDs with writes until they drop. Before a full petabyte of data was written, three of the six drives kicked the bucket. They are now at 1500TB of total writes and one of the three survivors, the 240GB Corsair Neutron GTX, dropped out. This was a bit surprising as it was reporting fairly high health when it entered "the petabyte club" aside from a dip in read speeds.

The two remaining drives are the Samsung 840 Pro (256GB) and Kingston HyperX 3K (240GB).

Between those two, the Samsung 840 Pro is given the nod as the Kingston drive lived through uncorrectable errors; meanwhile, the Samsung has yet to report any true errors (only reallocations). Since the test considers a failure to be a whole drive failure, though, the lashings will persist until the final drive gives out (or until Scott Wasson gives up in a glorious sledgehammer apocalypse -- could you imagine if one of them lasted a decade? :3).

Of course, with just one unit from each model, it is difficult to faithfully compare brands with this marathon. While each lasted a ridiculously long time, the worst of the bunch putting up with a whole 2800 full-drive writes, it would not be fair to determine an average lifespan for a given model with one data point each. It is good to suggest that your SSD probably did not die from a defrag run -- but it is still a complete waste of your time and you should never do it.

We're used to seeing various video card vendors tossing in some game titles to sweeten the deal. Now Samsung has jumped in the ring by including bonus copies of Assassin's Creed III with the purchase of 128, 256, or 512GB 840 Pro Series SSDs.